I’ve had my ebike for 5.5 months now, and I’ve ridden it about 850 miles, most of which are shown on the map here in red.

I’ve added an orange circle with a radius of 8 miles around the town where I live. I’ve only crossed over that circle once in all those miles. I’ve been trying to cycle down as many different roads as I can when I go out for a ride. I’ve no intention of trying to cover every single mile of road in the area but spotting gaps where I haven’t been yet is a fun way to plan rides.

It looks as though I’ve been avoiding a chunk of my local territory in the western and the southern parts of the circle. You can see by the colour of the terrain that it’s hillier there but my ebike likes hills! So what’s the problem?

This next image shows in pale blue highlights where the Google Street View car can get to…

… there are simply no roads in most of that space! And where there are roads they are heavily trafficked through routes - I don’t much want to ride my bike in among the lorries! While bikes can get to places and along routes that Street View’s pegman can’t reach, there still tend to be not many bike routes in most of those places.

The southernmost limb of my bike rides on that map was a ride I took last weekend. At that point the bike path is the Transpennine Trail which crosses the country so it certainly does extend further than I went and I may get to the orange circle that way at some point. On that day I’d gone about as far as I wanted to and the path was a bit rough and muddy. I’d like to travel further that way.

The road that heads off to the east is not one I really fancy cycling very much, though when I drive it I see plenty of cyclists. I don’t think there’s a cycle path out that way and I’d rather stay a bit further away from cars that travel too fast!

But drawing this map has made me see numerous places that I could explore a bit further from home between about the 10 and 4 o’clock positions on that map. The only time I’ve crossed the circle so far was around the 1 o’clock position, it was the longest ebike ride I’ve taken so far that was 26.5 miles long. I’m looking forward to filling in some more of the outskirts of my 8 mile radius.